Not to throw too much cold water on the list but as the enemy will surely point out if true, are they any Republicans of note on record during this period, fighting for the filibuster? If not, this is golden. If so, the MSM will just show how hypocritical both sides are and call it a draw.

Hey, thanks for sending this out. I only caught the last 3 minutes of this when it led on ABC News.

< j/k >

In all seriousness, this is great.

I am particularly amused at the Dems' new found commitment to original intent of the Founding Fathers (though there is no mention about the filibuster in the Constitution).

Also amusing is their commitment to keeping the filibuster around for when the Republicans are in the minority with a Dem President calling the shots. Either for lack of courage, or whatever, we NEVER used it on a judge before (and Lord knows we had LOTS of time in the Senate minority) so I have little reason to believe we would do so in the future anyway.

Peach, thank you for this post. It p*sses me off though that the Bush administration hasn't brought this up. "Banging the drums" for a simple up or down vote while quoting these Senators of yesterday SHOULD surely make headlines. Someone needs to hammer a fist on the podium and state these facts!!!

Actually what this list of quotations could be said to show is that there was once a time when the filibuster saved Republicans from some terrible Democrat justices. We should think carefully before giving up a procedure that might someday save us from a Chief Justice Hillary Clinton.

Justice Bork was on the Hannity show this afternoon and he said that when his name came up to be nominated on, Ted Kennedy made up a pack of lies to impugn his integrity...then said to Bork, "Nothing personal."

The only problem is, these dolts will not recall, even when confronted with the evidence, that they EVER held a view contrary to the one the now exclaim.

How can they possibly do this? It's quite simple actually, they have mastered:

DOUBLETHINK: the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one deniesall this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

156 posted on 05/20/2005 1:13:49 AM PDT by An.American.Expatriate
(Here's my strategy on the War against Terrorism: We win, they lose. - with apologies to R.R.)

The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world's greatest deliberative body. The greatest obstructive body is more like it. In the last season of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.

For years Senate filibusters--when they weren't conjuring up romantic images of Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, passing out from exhaustion on the Senate floor--consisted mainly of negative feats of endurance. Senator Sam Ervin once spoke for 22 hours straight. Outrage over these tactics and their ability to bring Senate business to a halt led to the current so-called two-track system, whereby a senator can hold up one piece of legislation while other business goes on as usual.

The two-track system has been nearly as obstructive as the old rules. Under those rules, if the Senate could not muster the 60 votes necessary to end debate and bring a bill to a vote, someone had to be willing to continue the debate, in person, on the floor. That is no longer required. Even if the 60 votes are not achieved, debate stops and the Senate proceeds with other business. The measure is simply put on hold until the next cloture vote. In this way a bill can be stymied at any number of points along its legislative journey.

One unpleasant and unforeseen consequence has been to make the filibuster easy to invoke and painless to pursue. Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which senators held passionate convictions, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, dooming any measure that cannot command the 60 required votes.

Mr. Harkin, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there must come a point in the process where the majority rules. This may not sit well with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to exact revenge by frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans frustrated Democrats in 1994.

Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to do that. He proposes to change the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes, the number of votes needed to close off debate would be reduced by three in each subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote--with votes occurring no more frequently than every second day--cloture could be invoked with only a simple majority. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel passionately about a given measure could still hold it up, but not indefinitely.

Another set of reforms, more incremental but also useful, is proposed by George Mitchell, who is retiring as the Democratic majority leader. He wants to eat away at some of the more annoying kinds of brakes that can be applied to a measure along its legislative journey.

One example is the procedure for sending a measure to a conference committee with the House. Under current rules, unless the Senate consents unanimously to send a measure to conference, three separate motions can be required to move it along. This gives one senator the power to hold up a measure almost indefinitely. Mr. Mitchell would like to reduce the number of motions to one.

He would also like to limit the debate on a motion to two hours and count the time consumed by quorum calls against the debate time of a senator, thus encouraging senators to save their time for debating the substance of a measure rather than in obstruction. All of his suggestions seem reasonable, but his reforms would leave the filibuster essentially intact.

The Harkin plan, along with some of Mr. Mitchell's proposals, would go a long way toward making the Senate a more productive place to conduct the nation's business. Republicans surely dread the kind of obstructionism they themselves practiced during the last Congress. Now is the perfect moment for them to unite with like-minded Democrats to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.